“Whitman, because he wants to stand for everyone, because he wants to be less a historical person than a marker for democratic personhood, can’t really write a memoir full of a life’s particularities. If he were to reveal the specific genesis and texture of his personality, if he presented a picture of irreducible individuality, he would lose his ability to be “Walt Whitman, a cosmos” — his “I” would belong to an empirical person rather than constituting a pronoun in which the readers of the future could participate.”

The Photo League was a New York City–based organization of professional and amateur photographers. A splinter group of the Film and Photo League, it was founded in 1936 by photographers Sid Grossman (1913–1955) and Sol Libsohn (1914–2001). Many of its members were young, first-generation, working-class Jewish Americans.

In keeping with its educational, activist, and aesthetic goals, the League offered lectures, darkroom access, and classes on history and technique, as well as exhibition opportunities. It promoted photography as a fine art and also championed the use of documentary photography to expose social problems and instigate social change.

During its fifteen-year existence, the League was among only a handful of places in New York that offered study in documentary photography, and it was unique in offering inexpensive classes and darkroom access.

The majority of the Photo League images were taken in New York City, but members also took photographs across the United States—for instance, in rural communities in the south—and, during World War II, in Europe, Asia, and Central America. Most of the photographs document ordinary people and everyday life and celebrate democracy in all its diversity. The photographs also include images of poverty and other hardships, which is not surprising given the social conscience of most of the members.

The League published a newsletter called Photo Notes, through which its members’ images, educational philosophies, and ideological stances and debates could be further disseminated.

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In this inquiry, we will not be starting from the idea of ​​a given world – natural or social – capable of immediately unifying minds and pacifying disputes. The starting point, rather, is a world that remains to be composed. Unification, thus, can not serve as a starting point only as a point of arrival, the result of a diplomatic enterprise that might well fail spectacularly.
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This uncertainty about that which is common is important in order to counteract the tendency to link environmental issues to the idea of a pre-defined, unified nature that has unified all existents, since they were “already there”. Environmental issues testify, on the contrary, to an uncertainty about the nature of the common world and to the need to create it piece by piece. It is this definition of common world that we wish to underline in the expression of common sense.

“Hobbes. Thinkers not bound to any religion can impress me only if their thinking is extreme enough. Hobbes is one of these; at the moment, I find him to be the most important. Few of his thoughts strike me as correct… Why, then, does his presentation so greatly impress me? Why do I enjoy his falsest thought as long as its expression is extreme enough? I believe that I have found in him the mental root of what I want to fight against the most. He is the only thinker I know who does not conceal power, its weight, its central place in all human action, and yet does not glorify power, he merely lets it be.”

You play a faceless, cloaked figure who glides through a vast desert towards a mountain on the horizon. Along the way, you may encounter a second player, with an identical avatar, who is plucked from the Internet through an online matchmaking system. Both players remain anonymous—there are no usernames or other identifying details—and communication is limited to varying combinations of the same, one-note chirp. No words ever appear onscreen during gameplay. The idea of the two-hour game is to make a pair of players connect, despite those limitations, and help each other move forward. Along the way, they solve puzzles and explore the remnants of a forgotten civilization.